Huangshui: the cold forest in the Shizhu hills

Shizhu is a hill county of 3,010 square kilometres, 321 kilometres from Chongqing, and its land rises from the Yangtze bank at Xituo to high ground where the forest park of Huangshui stands. The county's own scenic list puts Huangshui National Forest Park first, ahead of the Wanshou stockade and the Xituo stair, which tells you what the place is for. It is the cold end of the county: a town and a park in the same high country, with the kind of damp, shaded slope a particular plant needs. The Tujia of the plateau, above a thousand metres, eat buckwheat and herd sheep, and their life has always been the hardest of the three Tujia ways of living.

Shizhu is known as the home of Coptis chinensis, a plant whose root is one of the bitterest medicines in the Chinese pharmacopoeia and which grows where it is cold, wet and shaded. That is not a coincidence of scenery: the forest is the crop's habitat, and the reason the county's name travels. The other crop is water shield, a floating plant eaten as a vegetable, which came to 14,000 mu of ponds and 14,000 tonnes a year by 2020, worth 200 million yuan. Both are crops of cool water, and both depend on the forest holding the slope. A forest park in this county is not land taken out of production; it is the top of the system that production depends on.

The park is also the county's summer address. Shizhu's seat is hot in July in the way that all of the Sichuan basin's floor is hot, and the high ground is not, which makes a town at the edge of a forest park into a place with two seasons of custom. The road up is used by people who are not farmers: a family with a week, a hotel with a courtyard, a restaurant with a pond of water shield beside it. The Tujia country has always run on that movement between levels, highland and lowland, caravan and boat, and the summer road is the newest version of it. The forest stays the same; the traffic changes.